Apple issues day-one EFI update for new iMacs to address Boot Camp issue.

No sooner had Apple announced the 2013 iMacs than they also issued a day-one EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) update for the speedy new all-in-ones.

The update is targeted at an issue that sometimes occurs when installing a Boot Camp partition with Windows 7 or Windows 8. The issue appears when an external optical drive (the devices have no internal optical drive) and a USB thumb drive are connected at the same time, causing the screen to go black.

The update also ensures that the default boot drive for the system will be OS X after Windows 8 is installed. iMac (late 2013) EFI Update 2.1 can be downloaded from Apple’s support pages, and requires that the Mac be running OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4 or later.

Source: TUAW.

Apple Retail Stores making a play to sell Macs to Windows based business customers.

Apple is to make a play for the currently Windows based business users in a new sales initiative according to reports. Retail Stores will now display a 27-inch iMac in their business section prepared with Parallels and Windows 8.

Select Apple Retail employees will also be trained on the Parallels and Windows software, and special Parallels demos have been created for Apple Stores. The goal of this new initiative is to push employees to be able to show businesses that currently work on Windows that all purposes of Windows could either be replaced or used (with Parallels) on a Mac computer.

There’s no denying that Windows still overwhelmingly controls the business market, and for many companies moving away completely and going to OS X would be expensive and impractical. Parallels isn’t quite the same as running native Windows, but it’s close enough for most purposes, and who wouldn’t like to be staring at something like a 27-inch iMac all day at work instead of a generic looking Windows box? And, let’s not forget that the MacBook Pro was judged to be the best performing Windows machine.

It’s also a far cry from the Mac vs PC days, instead focusing on how Apple’s hardware can work in tandem with Microsoft’s operating system. Parallels isn’t the only method of running Windows 8 on a Mac of course. More recent updates to Mountain Lion added better driver support for Boot Camp to install Windows 8 on a separate partition, but Parallels is possibly more consumer friendly.

Source:  iMore.

Mac Users Just Can’t Stop Themselves From Updating To The Latest Version Of OS X.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Apple is how they approach upgrades. While companies like Microsoft sell their operating systems at an exorbitant licensing cost, Apple has favored an approach in which they release their operating system upgrades either for free (as with iOS) or at a low cost that anyone can afford.

The benefits are big. Updated versions of operating systems tend to be more secure, which helps guarantee OS X’s lead over Windows when it comes to malware. Naturally, then, Mac users tend to adopt new versions of OS X faster than Windows users upgrade, but the statistical disparity might surprise you.

According to a new study by Net Applications measuring operating system and browser adoption rates amongst visitors of about 40,000 web sites, Lion and Mountain Lion were both installed on 29% of all Macs within five months of release. Snow Leopard fared slightly better and was installed on 32 percent of all Macs within five months.

How does Windows compare? Not well. The best-selling version of Windows to date is Windows 7, which was installed on only 11% of all PICs after five months. Vista fared even worse, having showed up on only 5% of all PCs after five months.

What about Windows 8? Well, it’s too early to say, but it looks like it’s more a Vista than a 7. No surprise, really, given what a huge paradigm shift it is from the standard Windows experience.

Source:Cult of Mac.

Parallels 8 Brings Tighter Integration Between OS X and Windows.

by Matthew Panzarino from thenextweb.

If you’ve ever fired up a virtual machine on your Mac, then there’s a good chance you did so with one of the top two suites out there: Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. Both are perennial favorites among Macheads and there’s a lot to like in both suites.

But Parallels 8 throws the gauntlet in a major way, offering closer integration between OS X and Windows than I’ve ever seen in a virtual machine environment. The team pulled out all of the stops to make using Windows apps and even entire desktops a seamless and pleasant experience on any Mac, including the new Retina MacBook Pro.

Right out of the gate, Parallels 8 brings the big guns, fully supporting a Retina Windows 7 experience on your shiny new MacBook Pro. If you’ve tried it, you know that Windows running in Bootcamp isn’t Retina-ready by a longshot. That means that the Parallels team had to figure out a way to render its own version of a Retina enhanced Windows desktop, and it did, Windows apps and most UI elements look great at Retina resolutions when used as a VM.

But Retina isn’t the only thing that Parallels 8 brings to Windows. You also get Windows apps built right into your Mountain Lion launchpad, clearly marked with the Parallels bars so you know that they’re just guests. Each app can be run in the Windows virtual machine or in  seamless Coherence mode that lets you run them in a window right alongside your Mac apps. The apps can be run in full-screen as well, with complete support for Mission Control.

They’ve even pulled some fancy tricks with the mouse cursor. If you move at speed toward the edge of a VM window, it will pass over the border without pause. If, however, you’re moving more slowly, it will stop at the edge of the window. This lets you hit those tricky hot corners and side pixels that are so prevalent in Windows 8.

The app-by-app integration doesn’t stop there, though. There’s an ‘open in IE’ button added to Safari for you so that you can open pages hard coded to work in Internet Explorer seamlessly without even having to dip into your VM to launch it. Apps like PowerPoint also work perfectly in presentation mode, letting you mirror a slideshow right from inside a VM. If you want to start a new mail in Outlook that already has a picture attached, you can just drag an image right onto the Outlook icon, just as you do with Mail.app.

Beyond individual apps, a bunch more of Mountain Lion’s most distinctive features are also supported in Parallels 8.

You can use Mountain Lion’s new voice dictation feature in any Windows app that accepts text. This behavior mimics the way that it works natively in OS X so well that the effect is almost completely seamless, it just works.

They’ve also hooked Parallels up to Notification Center, allowing Windows apps to send notifications out to the center instead of their standard alerts in Windows. Their icon, superimposed with the Parallels bars, even appears right in the notification. It’s really an incredible implementation.

You can also drag and drop any file right between your VM and your OS X machine, or vice-versa. This is one of the most requested features for any VM user, so it’s nice to see it arrive in the new Parallels.

All the stock Mountain Lion gestures are also supported in any of your unlimited allowance of Virtual Machines. Any changes made to keyboard language in OS X automatically sync up with Windows as well, it’s all very slick.

Parallels Desktop 8 also gets a nice performance boost over version 7. Parallels says it’s up to 30% faster for read/write operations, 30% faster for games and up to 25% faster on boot, suspend, shutdown and resume actions.

You can run Parallels from a USB stick, and it also supports downloading the Windows 8 Release Preview right from inside the new VM wizard.

Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac is available starting today as an upgrade for current Parallels Desktop for Mac users only for $49.99. New customers will have to wait until September 4th when they can get it in Apple stores, or a bunch of other online and in-store outlets.

Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac is $79.99, and the Student Edition will be $39.99. Parallels 8 also comes in a Switch to Mac Edition with cables and special instructions for switchers at $99.99.

If you’re currently using Parallels competitor VMware Fusion, they’ll also give you the $49.99 upgrade price. There are also a bunch of subscription and enterprise options.

If you bought Parallels 7 for Mac any time after July 25th, you’ll get a free upgrade at no charge.